macrumors newbie

Hi all, I'm from Italy, so sorry for my terrible english.
As the question in the title, I've done some research and this is what I have found. My intent is to install this video card into the iMac late 2009 with hd4670.

macrumors 6502a

Did the new video card come out of another Mac? If it didn't (i.e., if it is a card from a PC) then it is unlikely to work because it won't have EFI.

The firmware on the card needs to be Mac-specific for it to be able to boot.

The Mac Pro can boot without this firmware (the screen is just black until OS X boots up), but the iMac will just fail the boot test and refuse to boot up unless it has an officially Mac-compatible card. This means finding a donor card from another iMac, or flashing the ROM on the new card with a Mac firmware, assuming you can find one that will work.

macrumors newbie

Did the new video card come out of another Mac? If it didn't (i.e., if it is a card from a PC) then it is unlikely to work because it won't have EFI.

The firmware on the card needs to be Mac-specific for it to be able to boot.

The Mac Pro can boot without this firmware (the screen is just black until OS X boots up), but the iMac will just fail the boot test and refuse to boot up unless it has an officially Mac-compatible card. This means finding a donor card from another iMac, or flashing the ROM on the new card with a Mac firmware, assuming you can find one that will work.

Yeah sure, Apple doesn't give the possibilities to replace the gpu card, so we never have the 100% guarantee.
But we have right now theoric and practice hardware compatibility and theoric software compatibility.
Thank you!

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